Conservation
“The disasters I feared my grandchildren would see in their old age are happening already: insect populations collapsing, mass extinction, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, floods. This is the world we have bequeathed to you. Yours is among the first of the unborn generations we failed to consider as our consumption rocketed. … For years, many people of my age denied there was a problem. They denied that climate breakdown was happening. They denied that extinction was happening. They denied that the world’s living systems were collapsing. … They denied all this because accepting it meant questioning everything they believed to be good. If the science was right, their car could not be right. If the science was right, their foreign holiday could not be right. Economic growth, rising consumption, the entire system they had been brought up to believe was right, had to be wrong.”
George Monbiot, journalist and author
“There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere there was a shadow of death. … No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”
Rachel Carson, biologist, Silent Spring, 1962
“Nature reserves are becoming natural art installations. It’s just like looking at your favourite Constable or Rothko. We go there, muse over it, and feel good because we’ve seen a bittern or some avocets or orchids. But on the journey home there’s nothing – only wood pigeons and non-native pheasants and dead badgers on the side of the road.”
Chris Packham, Springwatch presenter
“People think I’m trying to save fluffy animals.
But I’m trying to stop the human race from committing suicide.”
Gerald Durrell, conservationist, author, zookeeper 1925-1995
“The government claims [its 2011 Natural Environment White Paper] sets out a radical vision… Yet [it allowed] licensing buzzard and lesser black-backed gull control, opposing an EU ban on neonicotinoids, attacking European environmental legislation, undermining Natural England, dismantling the Biodiversity Action Plan framework, … nature in Britain .. is now facing an almost unprecedented challenge. We are arguably rolling back a quarter century of steady progress to the days of the 1980s”
Mathew Frith, conservationist. London Wildlife Trust
(Wild London, Summer 2013, pages 7-8)
“The idea that nature and [the] economy are somehow alternatives, that one (nature) must be sacrificed for the other (growth) is to me one of the most dangerous misconceptions of modern times.”
Tony Juniper, conservationist
(Natural World, Summer 2013, page 16)